The present invention relates to an information search/presentation system for providing a 3D stereoscopic image at a point desired by a user and information about landmarks in the image.
General methods of performing Web page search on the WWW (Word Wide Web) and page search based on portable telephone information providing services include a method of sequentially selecting menus created in advance and tracing links to destination pages. A characteristic feature of these search methods is that pages are independently searched out regardless of physical positions. If, for example, a user searches for information about flower shops, hit pages about flower shops in Tokyo, Paris, New York, and the like are presented regardless of the positions at which they actually exist.
The above search method is convenient when locations are insignificant. If, however, a user is standing in front of a station X in Tokyo and wants to find a nearby flower shop, he/she requires only pages about flower shops near the station. In this case, the conventional search method, by which even pages about flower shops in Paris and New York are searched out, is inconvenient.
A method of solving this problem has been proposed, in which when 2D map information is presented to a user, and the user designates a certain place on the presented map, shop information is presented by automatically tracing a link to the shop information located at the designated place. Such a method is generally available and includes, for example, a method in which when a country map is presented to a user and the user designates a certain prefecture in the presented map, a jump is made to information about the prefecture.
For example, on the home page of the French Government Tourist Office, when a user clicks a certain prefecture in a displayed map of France with a mouse, a jump is made to information about the prefecture. This method can be easily implemented on the Web by using a clickable map technique, and hence is frequently used. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-34902 discloses an advertisement information providing system for providing information at a link destination as advertisement information, which is applied to a 2D map.
The following problems are posed in the method of accepting an input from a user upon presentation of 2D map information. First, it takes considerable effort to update map information. In an urban area, in particular, reconstruction of buildings, construction of new roads, and the like are often made. It requires tremendous work to maintain and update corresponding map information so as to quickly reflect the above situations in the map information. Second, a search for information from a map is convenient as a search operation, but is not fun for a user. This is because a search from a map is cumbersome operation like a search for a station on a route from a timetable.